Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

1 The learner gets access to individual content words ‘see. car.’
2 The learner gets access to grammatical structure words ‘see. the car.’ (called the
‘category procedure’).
3 The learner assembles these into phrases ‘he see. the car.’ (the ‘phrasal procedure’).
4 The learner puts the phrases together within the sentence ‘he will see the car’
(the ‘S-procedure’).
5 The learner can work with both main clauses and subordinate clauses: ‘If he looks
out of the window, he will see the car’ (the ‘subordinate clause procedure’).
Learning and teaching different types of grammar
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In a sense, the teacher is helpless to do much about sequences like the grammat-
ical morphemes order. If all students have to acquire language in more or less the
same sequence, the teacher can only fit in with it. This processability model leads
to the teachability hypothesis: ‘an L2 structure can be learnt from instruction only 
if the learner’s interlanguage is close to the point when this structure is acquired
in the natural setting’ (Pienemann, 1984: 201). So teachers should teach accord-
ing to the stage that their students are at. To take some examples from the above
sequence:
●
Do not teach the third person ‘-s’ ending of present tense verbs in ‘He likes’ at
early stages as it inevitably comes late.
●
In the early stages concentrate on the main word order of subject verb object
(SVO), ‘Cats like milk’, and do not expect learners to learn the word order of
questions, ‘What do cats like?’, and so on, until much later.
●
Introduce sentence-initial adverbials, ‘In summer I play tennis’, as a way into
the movement involved in questions, ‘Do you like Brahms?’
These are three possible suggestions out of the many that arise from the research.
They conflict with the sequence in which the grammatical points are usually intro-
duced in textbooks; ‘-s’ endings and questions often come in opening lessons; ini-
tial adverbial phrases are unlikely to be taught before questions. It may be that
there are good teaching reasons why these suggestions should not be taken on
board. For instance, when people tried postponing using questions for the first year
of teaching to avoid movement, this created enormous practical problems in the
classroom, where questions are the lifeblood. But these ideas are nevertheless
worth considering in the sequencing of materials, whatever other factors may over-
rule them.
Let us compare the sequence of elements in a typical EFL course with that in the
processability model. A typical modern course is Flying Colours (Garton-Sprenger
and Greenall, 1990), intended for adult beginners. Unit 1 of Flying Colours starts
with the student looking for ‘international words’ such as ‘bar’ and ‘jeans’, and
repeating short formulas such as ‘What’s your name?’ and ‘I don’t understand’.
Thus it starts with words rather than structures, as does the processability model.
Unit 2, however, plunges into questions: ‘What is your phone number?’, ‘Would
you like some French onion soup?’, ‘What does Kenneth Hill do?’ In terms of the
processability model these come in stages 3 and 5 and should not be attempted
until the students have the main subject verb object structure of English fixed in
their minds. Certainly this early introduction of questions is a major difference
from the processability model. Unit 3 introduces the present continuous tense –
‘She’s wearing a jacket and jeans’. While this is already late compared to courses
that introduce the present continuous in lesson 1, it is far in advance of its posi-
tion in the processability model sequence at stage 4. Subordinate clauses are not
mentioned in Flying Colours, apart from comparative clauses in Unit 6. Looking
through the text, however, one finds in Unit 1 that the students have to under-
stand sentences such as ‘When he goes to a foreign country, he learns. . .’ (‘when’
clause), ‘Listen and say who is speaking’ (reported speech clause), ‘Boris Becker
wins after a hurricane stops the match’ (‘after’ clause), ‘The only other things I
buy are a map and some postcards’ (relative clause). Clearly subordinate clauses
are not seen as particularly difficult; the processability model, however, insists
that they are mastered last of all.
The processability model 31

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Some other differences between the L2 stages and the sequences in EFL course-
books are:
●
The textbook collapses two L2 stages into one. Atlas 1 (Nunan, 1995), for exam-
ple, teaches auxiliary questions ‘Can you come to my birthday party tomor-
row?’, copula questions ‘Are you Michael Shaw?’, wh-questions ‘Where are you
from?’ and reported questions ‘Talk about where you are from’ all in Unit 1 of
a ‘beginning’ course, despite the fact that in the processability model these
would be scattered across stages 3 to 6.
●
The textbook goes against some aspects of the order. For example, Tapestry 1
Writing (Pike-Baky, 2000) for ‘high beginning’ students uses subordinate
clauses from the outset, despite their apparent lateness in acquisition. Chapter
2 has instructions ‘Think about where you go every day’, text sentences ‘So he
designed an environment where people “can take their minds off” their prob-
lems’, and completion sentences ‘I believe that Feng Shui. . .’, all of which
would be impossible for students below the most advanced stage of the
processability model.
●
The coursebook omits some stages, for instance, not teaching initial adverbs and
preposition-stranding, unmentioned in the grammatical syllabuses for, say, New
Cutting Edge (Cunningham et al., 2005), New Headway (Soars and Soars, 2002) or
Just Right (Harmer, 2004), even if they doubtless creep in somewhere.
●
When coursebooks make use of grammatical sequences at all, they tend to rely
on a skeleton of tenses and verb forms, by no means central to the processabil-
ity model or indeed to any of the approaches found in SLA research. For
instance International Express (Taylor, 1996) for pre-intermediates follows the
sequence present simple (Unit 1), present continuous (2), past simple (3), pres-
ent perfect (6), future ‘will’ (9), passives (12) – a typical EFL teaching sequence
for most of the twentieth century but virtually unconnected to any of the L2
learning sequences.
One problem is very hard for language teaching to resolve. Learners’ interlan-
guages contain rules that are different from the native speaker’s competence. The
student may temporarily produce sentences that deviate from native correctness,
say, stage 2 ‘No me live here’. Many teaching techniques, however, assume that the
point of an exercise is to get the student to produce sentences from the very first
lesson that are completely correct in terms of the target language, even if they are
severely restricted in terms of grammar and vocabulary. The students are not sup-
posed to be producing sentences like ‘No me live here’ in the classroom. Teaching
materials similarly only present sentences that are possible in terms of the target
language, never letting learners hear sentences such as ‘No me live here’. Hence the
classroom and the textbook can never fully reflect the stages that interlanguages go
through, which may well be quite ungrammatical in terms of the target language
for a long time – just as children only get round to fully grammatical sentences in
their first language after many years. There is an implicit tension between the pres-
sure on students to produce well-formed sentences and the natural stages that stu-
dents go through. Should learners be allowed to produce these ‘mistakes’ in the
classroom, since they are inevitable? Or should the teacher try to prevent them?
The answers to these questions also affect when and how the teacher will correct
the student’s ‘mistakes’.
Learning and teaching different types of grammar